The Rutgers Center for the Organization and Financing of Care for the Severely Mentally Ill studies how services, and the economic and organizational frameworks within which they are encompassed, can most effectively reduce disability and enhance the quality of life of persons with severe and persistent mental illness. The center brings together an experienced interdisciplinary research team representing the major social and behavioral sciences and mental health professions to address issues related to services and policy at the national, state and local levels. The Center collaborates with two state mental health authorities (New Jersey and New York), and a variety of clinical settings serving persons with severe mental illness. The research agenda includes 23 projects organized within four areas of concern: organization, financing, and service systems issues; family and minority group issues; studies of children's and adolescents' mental health; and more general policy issues. Several of these projects involve collaborative studies with the Office of Mental Health of the state of New York, the Division of Mental Health and Hospitals of the state of New Jersey, and the New Jersey departments of Health and Human Services. The center includes 35 investigators and collaborating scientists representing the fields of sociology, economics, psychiatry, psychology, nursing, social work, epidemiology, public health, family medicine and public policy. The Center's core funding facilitates stability and continuity in its research agenda, allows exploratory projects and the development of new relationships with public mental health systems, clinical facilities, and mental health consumer groups, and assists in career development of professionals and researchers in mental health services. The Center's programs, research projects and training efforts create an environment highly supportive of mental health services research and interdisciplinary and interprofessional collaboration.